Maybe Don't Wanna
Page 10
Though, I hadn’t fallen asleep once without thinking about him. And, at some point during the night, he’d gone out of his way to wake me up from my nightmares, despite me walking out on him.
I was still processing what I’d learned, and I wasn’t sure if I could ever be okay with what he’d done.
But, I was trying.
I was also getting nowhere, and I was going crazy over it.
Which had to be why I agreed to the lunacy Janie proposed.
***
I looked at the dogs as I got ready for bed. Then fed first one a rawhide, then the other one.
“Now listen,” I said to them both. “Y’all are going to go to bed. Y’all won’t cry. Y’all won’t wake me up early in the morning. And you won’t do anything that’ll make me hate you. Do you understand?”
The dogs blinked innocently at me, and I could’ve sworn I heard laughing through the wall.
I didn’t need confirmation. I knew exactly what Parker was doing. “Fuck off.”
The laughing got louder, but also sounded more muffled.
I turned around and glared at the drywall, wood, and lack of insulation separating me from that man.
“I know you’re not laughing at me,” I growled.
The laughing turned to guffaws.
“They’re dogs,” he gasped out from between laughing breaths. “How bad can they be?
Obviously, he didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to say stuff like that.
Because my “how bad can it be” turned into “how much worse can it get?” And I had my fucking Roomba to thank for it.
I thought I was hot shit ordering that bitch on Black Friday for a hundred bucks. Seeing as I hated freakin’ anything that had to do with cleaning, I thought I won the lottery. The moment I’d gotten home last week I’d set it up to go off every single night at three o’clock in the morning. And seeing as I slept like the dead most of the time, I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t do it then. It wouldn’t wake me up, that was for sure.
It all started out fairly normal. We went to bed, the dogs on the floor, and everything was great. I fell asleep to the dogs chewing their rawhides.
I woke up to a living hell.
At first, I wasn’t too sure what it was that woke me, but it didn’t take long for me to recognize the problem.
Poop.
Dog poop.
And lots of it if the smell was anything to go by.
Fuck!
I sat up in bed, flipped on the light, and started looking.
At first, I didn’t see anything.
I mean, honestly, I only had a one-bedroom apartment. And I could see the entire living room and three-quarters of the kitchen.
I had dark brown wood floors.
My eyes swept over my Roomba, then continued to search.
The longer I looked, the more the sleep cleared from my eyes until suddenly, I saw it.
The floor was covered in it. And my Roomba was slowly tracking it all over the floor as it covered every single available inch of my eight-hundred-square-foot apartment.
Horror struck my brain at the same time I shrieked.
The dogs, who both looked at me innocently, sat up at my yell.
“What the fuck?” Parker called through the wall. “What are you fucking screaming about at three o’clock in the morning?”
I felt my anger rise.
Blindly I reached for my phone, but something on the cord caught my eye. Poop. On my iPhone cord.
I unplugged it, laid it gently back to where it wasn’t touching my bed, and called Janie.
She answered sleepily.
“Hello?”
“You have exactly twenty minutes to get over here and clean this up, or I will never speak to you again,” I said irately into the phone.
“Clean what up?” she asked, sounding sleepy still.
“You know how I have my Roomba set to go off at three in the morning?” I asked calmly.
“Yes…”
“One of your dogs decided to shit on my floor last night,” I said carefully. “And my Roomba decided to run it over. And then track it all over my goddamn bedroom—and that’s not even including my living room and kitchen.”
The man next door started to guffaw, and I glared at the wall.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“You have twenty minutes,” I said.
“Kayla, but…”
“You don’t leave for the airport for another freakin’ two hours. You have time.”
Then I hung up.
I would not be dealing with this shit. Literally.
I sat back on my bed and glared at the dogs.
“Which one of you was it?” I accused them both.
The dogs’ ears tilted at my low tone.
Neither one of them confessed, the bastards.
I idly started to flip through Facebook on my phone while trying really hard not to get nauseous from the smell.
Which, I might add, I wasn’t very successful at.
I was very susceptible to smells.
Unfortunately.
The first video I clicked on was a cat called the Cat Excavator. It was of one of those sphynx cats—the hairless ones—that was opening his jaws as wide as he could manage each time he took a bite.
I grinned.
Then moved on to another cat—this one a Maine Coon.
The next video was of a windshield cover that allowed your window to be ice/snow free when you came out in the mornings.
“I need me one of these,” I said as I watched.
Then, without even thinking, I forwarded the video to Parker.
I heard his phone ding on the other side of the wall, then his snort following shortly after.
“It doesn’t snow here, Kayla. It frosts, but if you start your car and let the heater run for five minutes, you’ll be golden.”
“But with this, all I would have to do is take it off and it’s good,” I countered.
“It takes five minutes to put it on and a couple of minutes to take it off. Then put it away. And by that time, you might as well have just started the car,” he pointed out.
I hated when he used common sense on me.
“Whatever,” I muttered, then smiled at the next video I saw.
A snowman—a rather ripped one at that—with a large carrot in place of the snowman’s dick.
I forwarded that one to him, too. But I didn’t get the same result from him.
“Gross.”
I grinned and continued to scroll. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Atch,” I answered.
“Atch who?”
“Bless you.”
I grinned when he groaned.
The next video was of a gun that looked really pretty. So I sent that one, too. “Do you think this is stupid to have?”
“Honestly?” he asked. “I’ll never own a pink or blue gun. It just strikes me as riding a thin line. I know that kids should know better than to touch your firearms—and most of them do—but there are those kids who are curious. I wouldn’t want that extra temptation of pretty colors enticing them just in case.”
I actually kind of agreed with him.
Surprise.
“I’ll remember that,” I told him. “But, right now, I only own a taser.”
“Is it pink?”
I grinned. “Yeah.”
He sighed. “Why does that not surprise me?”
Someone knocked at my door, but I didn’t get up to answer it.
Instead, I texted Janie to ‘come in.’
She did, and immediately stopped right inside the threshold.
Her husband was right on her heels, and the moment the smell hit them both, they winced.
“Oh, God. It’s worse than I thought,” she moaned.
I agreed, but I also hadn’t gotten up to look because I did
n’t want to know how bad it was. I just wanted to have it all cleaned up and go back to bed.
This had been the first night that I hadn’t woken up with a nightmare of a headache or Parker banging on my walls.
My eyes were heavy, and honestly, I could use the sleep.
Especially now that Parker wasn’t there to help me sleep.
“Janie?” Janie looked up and stared at me thoughtfully. “I don’t care if you don’t want to do it. You will, and when you finish, my house will be as good as new…oh, and that Roomba is yours. You’ll buy me a new one.”
I then stood up in my bed, uncaring that I was only in my t-shirt and panties and took a running leap toward my balcony door.
I landed on a clean patch—thank God—and slipped out onto the balcony.
“Where are you going?”
“Over to a friend’s.” I paused and looked over my shoulder. “Make sure you lock up. Oh, and ask someone else to watch your dogs. I might be mad at them for a couple of days.”
I closed the door well behind me, and then looked around the covered balcony of mine.
I hadn’t been out here much.
Maybe a handful of times.
But only because I disliked how close my balcony was to the one next door—Parker’s. There was another apartment on my opposite side, but that apartment had remained vacant for a while—I didn’t really know why.
Tonight, I was happy that my balcony was so close to Parker’s, because that meant all I had to do to get over to his side was climb over the waist-high railing.
Or, I would have had Parker not met me halfway and lifted me over using two really huge hands on my hips.
The moment that I was on his side of the balcony, I pushed past him, stepped through the door and around Carmen, then dove for his bed.
It smelled like him.
All yummy and rawr.
I was sure those two things should be bottled up and then made into a candle. Someone would make a million dollars just off of me, because I wouldn’t be able to resist the smell or the candle.
Parker didn’t say another word as I made myself comfortable on his bed—the warm side just like he liked to do in mine. Or I would have had he not followed me into the bed, flipped off the light, then bodily lifted me up and planted me on the other side of him.
But, it didn’t matter.
Mostly because I was still pressed up to his side—and no part of my body in any way, shape, or form was even remotely cold.
Not at all.
I heard Janie and Rafe expressing their apparent horror, but I didn’t stay awake long enough to laugh at their plight.
Nope.
I think it was physically impossible to do much of anything when you’re curled around a man much bigger than yourself. One who I was quickly coming to have feelings for. One who, in the three days since he told me his worst misdeed in life, I still couldn’t stop thinking about him.
I still didn’t know what I would do.
Frankly, I didn’t really want to think about it.
But I knew that it felt right when I was in Parker’s arms.
I also knew that, when the time came, I’d figure it out. Until then, I’d bask in the blissful ignorance and pretend that it wasn’t anywhere near as serious as it was.
Chapter 13
Why are there upper and lowercase letters, but not numbers? Sometimes I want to write loud numbers, and I can’t do that since there aren’t any uppercase numbers.
-Text from Kayla to Parker
Parker
“So why did your parents get divorced?” Kayla turned her eyes to me.
We were lying in bed the next morning.
The alarm clock that I set every night to wake me up at five for my run and workout had been turned off. However, neither one of us had moved.
I physically wouldn’t until she got up off of me.
There was no man in the world who would be capable of leaving her in the bed and go to work out. I’d do that tomorrow. Maybe.
“You want to know the lie my mom told people or the actual truth?” I asked.
She seemed to consider it for a moment as she ran her fingers over my chest hair, first smoothing it this way, then smoothing it that.
“Well, how about you start with the lie your mother told and then tell me the truth,” she suggested.
My grin kicked up at one corner.
How did I know she would choose that?
She was always thinking outside the box, and I loved that about her.
I sighed and turned to my side, taking her with me. Her back was to my front, her sweet, supple ass pressed almost to my crotch. If she scooted back an inch, she’d feel the column of my cock—and just how hard I was for her.
Her head was resting on my bicep, and she had both of her hands wrapped around my forearm.
I practically itched to yank her panties down and shove two fingers straight into her delicious pussy.
“My mother’s lie went like this: my father expressed his willingness to cheat, and they decided to divorce.”
“That’s kind of boring,” Kayla admitted.
I snorted.
“It’s not that far from the truth, honestly. What happened was that my father decided about a year into his marriage to my mother that he wanted another wife.”
Kayla’s brow went up. “Oh really?”
I nodded. “The problem my mom had with that was not that he wanted another wife—which, technically, she did have a problem with—but that he still wanted to keep her as his wife too. He wanted two wives because, apparently, he had needs that weren’t being met by her alone.”
She rolled over in my arms, and her face came into view. The glow from the streetlight at my back lit up her entire face, and the look on that face made me smile.
Kayla’s eyes were as big as saucers.
“Your father is a sister wife guy?”
My brows went up. “Sister wife?”
“There’s a TV show on TLC. Sister Wives…or something like that,” she said. “How many wives does he have?”
“Legally? One. Illegally—he has three others.”
“Your father has four wives,” she repeated, sounding in awe.
I nodded.
“That’s…that’s actually kind of cool.” She paused. “In an interesting sort of way. I have never in my life known anyone who has multiple wives. Do they act like they’re all married? Are there any like ménage things going on?”
I shuddered. “I have no fucking idea, and I really hope to never find out.”
This subject made me extremely uncomfortable and always had. It was hard to explain to your friends that your family was fucked up—and why.
To hide my annoyance at the situation, I reached over Kayla’s shoulder for the television remote and flipped it on.
She would think that this was just my morning routine—which it was. But at this point in time, I needed to not talk about my father, and the morning news would be perfect for that.
The TV came on, and I searched for my preferable news station until it appeared on the screen.
I didn’t like talking about my mom. I didn’t like talking about my sister. And I definitely didn’t like talking about my father.
Out of the three, he was the worst one that I had to think about.
It was hard to know that you would never be good enough in the eyes of your own father.
But I wasn’t.
I was, and always would be, hated by him.
He had ten other children by four different women, and all of them were loved more than me.
My dad couldn’t even stand to look at me.
“Gotta watch the news as I get dressed to work out,” I told her.
I wouldn’t be getting much of a work out in, considering I was still in bed instead of out on my run, something I should have left for twenty-five minutes ago to do, but I could go for a quick mile.
“This movie is better,” she said. “And your news doesn’t come on until six. We still have eight minutes and thirty seconds.”
I rolled my eyes and walked into the bathroom, pulling the door closed behind me.
That didn’t stop her from talking to me through the closed door.
“I would definitely love a man if he brought me a chicken burrito.”
I snorted through a mouth full of toothpaste and removed the brush from my mouth long enough to answer her. “He went to jail, nearly got kicked out of his brother’s house, and then was forced to either go into the military or lose everything. He was a stupid son of a bitch, and honestly should’ve never been in that position in the first place.”
The movie she was referencing was Battleship, and for some reason, it was her absolute favorite.
I put the brush back into my mouth and continued to brush, but waited for her follow up comment, knowing it was coming.
She grunted. “I once got kicked out of my college psychology class for bringing a burrito.”
My brows rose. “Normally professors don’t give a fuck in college. That surprises me.”
She shrugged. “The teacher hated me. With a passion. She didn’t like that I always had something to say and disliked it even more that I was always available to offer up my opinion. Especially when I thought she was wrong.”
“You said she was wrong?” I questioned.
She shrugged. “Not in so many words, I just wanted her to explain it to me. But she couldn’t give me an explanation to the question I’d asked, causing me to believe that she didn’t know the answer. Not that she wasn’t willing to answer. If she’d just have said she didn’t know the answer to that, I would’ve been all right, but she didn’t. She just kept talking her way into a hole…and I took advantage of that.”
I washed my face and mouth free of residual toothpaste, and then headed back out.
The moment I returned, she flipped it back over to the news station that I usually watched.
Neither one of us watched it though.
I went to my closet and started getting dressed.
She watched me get dressed.
Both of our attentions were caught, however, when the weatherman came on.
The weatherman was telling us how we could possibly see a quarter of an inch of snow over the next couple of hours, which had me shifting into a better mood instantly.